“[T]he world appears to be on the verge of a boom in a little-known but promising type of solar power,” predicts the New York Times, talking about huge plants using solar thermal power.
It is not the kind that features shiny panels bolted to the roofs of houses. This type involves covering acres of desert with mirrors that focus intense sunlight on a fluid, heating it enough to make steam. The steam turns a turbine and generates electricity.
It’s also much more efficient than the “shiny panels”, and newer technologies can even store the heat for extended use after nightfall. Several companies, anticipating a solar energy boom, are building new factories and plants to provide more clean energy. Most of these are being built in California which has passed mandates for renewable energy — they hope to have 20% of their energy come from renewable sources by 2010.
The deserts of California, Arizona, and Nevada are of course some of the sunniest places in the States, making them ideal for large solar plants like these.
(click the map or go here to see a bigger version)
The map is from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory which has a lot of in-depth reports and research on many types of Renewable Energy. The American Solar Energy Society offers a lot of information too, including a handy FAQ for those of us who don’t know the first thing about solar energy.
I tried to learn a little more about the possibilities for Texas and came up with http://www.infinitepower.org/. The website explains that “[i]n the mid-1990′s, the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO), contracted for a study to evaluate Texas’s renewable energy resource base, including solar, wind, biomass, water, geothermal and building climatology,” and the site is the culmination of that research. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in there, for instance, that 4.3% of Texas’s land contains the potential to power the entire state through wind energy. Now, I’m sure it would be impractical (and expensive) to suddenly erect a bunch of windfarms in the Panhandle, but it’s nice to know that wind energy, however variable it may be, is a viable and clean source of energy for Texas, and even more so in other parts of the U.S. About solar energy, they conclude:
Solar radiation is available throughout the state in sufficient quantity to power distributed solar systems such as solar water heaters and off-grid photovoltaic panels. On the other hand, large solar power plants will almost certainly be most cost-effective when sited in areas of West Texas that receive very high levels of direct solar radiation. Solar developments of both types can become major contributors to satisfying the future energy needs of Texas.
The NYTimes article also points out some of the downsides of solar energy, including the impact large plants will have on the desert environment. (One plant already has to keep a tortoise wrangler to keep the poor things from getting lost and fried.) More immediately, solar energy still isn’t economically feasible without government’s help. Most of the impetus for the recent investments is due to high prices of oil of late, and though the technology and efficiency is always improving, solar energy only stands a chance when the price of natural gas and other fossil fuels is high — or when governments manipulate the market by giving subsidies to solar plants or taxing fossil fuels.
The power they produce is still relatively expensive. Industry experts say the plant here produces power at a cost per kilowatt- hour of 15 to 20 cents. With a little more experience and some economies of scale, that could fall to about 10 cents, according to a recent report by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. Newly built coal-fired plants are expected to produce power at about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour or more if carbon is taxed.
The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium.
I must say I’m a little suprised at that. Even if American policy makers and scientists still seem willing to squabble about whether or not human fossil fuel usage causes global warming, surely if we projected how much fossil fuel will be available in the near future, how accessible it will be, what the rising prices will likely be, etc, the price of building sustainable renewable-energy plants would pay out… There must be studies on this out there. I’m not saying we should suddenly switch the grid over to solar. (If you asked me, in fact, I’d favor a more decentralized energy plan, drawing from many different sources.) But assuming my guesses are correct, the cost analysis alone, plus the benefit of being seen as one of the pioneers into green energy, makes me think that fairly reliable alternative energy sources, like solar energy, would be a lot more attractive to energy companies.
Posted by grassideas 
